Secondary School With only a few weeks of school left for Year 12, our Head Prefect and Deputy Head Prefect, Priya and Sammy, have been reflecting on their time as student leaders and the unprecedented experience of sitting for HSC Trials online and remotely. We asked the girls to share their thoughts.
Q: Online HSC Trials – be honest, how were they?
Sammy: It actually relieved a lot of stress to do these exams at home. Not having to wake up so early to travel to school was a bonus. It was also less stressful because you didn’t have that pre-exam chatter comparing what we did and didn’t study. It was just exciting to get them done, honestly.
Priya: We were lucky that the transition to online exams was done really well by the team at Pymble – Ms Stanfield (Director of Student Learning 11-12) and Mr Raymond (Deputy Principal – Academic K-12) were amazing. When questions would pop up about the new process, they were straight back on email, replying and helping to make things easier.
Q: What are your best tips for Year 11 students who are in the middle of their online end-of-year exams?
Sammy: Number one: make sure all your devices are fully charged. Triple check your chargers are plugged in!
Priya: Figure out an exam routine that works for you. For the first couple of days, I was still trying to find my footing. Having my desk in my bedroom works fine for normal school days but getting myself into the exam headspace required a different routine, such as going for a walk with my mum or having a really good breakfast and talking to my family while I ate. I found that having an exam-day routine really helped me to get out of the bed space and into the desk space.
Sammy: Also, leave more than enough time to set up your space before the exam starts. We were advised to log in 30 minutes before each exam. Towards the end, I left it to 25 minutes and then I’d be stressing out as I was one of the last to be let in. Being early and settled in gives you a sense of reassurance.
Q: We’re one week away from announcing our new prefects for 2021/22. What advice do you have for our incoming student leaders?
Priya: Get to know your team. It’s really important to spend time getting to know who’s good at what, where each role fits in and the different personalities of all the prefects so you can best work together to achieve your vision. Also, start thinking about your 2022 vision early!
Sammy: An important lesson we learnt was to give ourselves a big timeframe to organise our initiatives – and get lots of different prefects involved to keep the prefect body united. We’ve learnt not to do last minute!
Q: Finally, what will you remember as highlights of your time as Head and Deputy Head Prefect?
Sammy: Leadership gives you so many opportunities to meet people and get to know others, whether that’s your prefect body, students in other year groups or leaders from other schools. For me, that was amazing.
Priya: The best thing was being able to lead a vision and be a big part of seeing that vision come true. Our ‘2021: Together as One’ theme was the first big project the prefects worked on as a team. After having had so much of last year online, to have almost the whole school there for the launch at assembly and to see everyone getting into it was a really big moment for us.
